208 AET IN PHOTOGEAPHT. 



same plate, which would secure an open landscape in full 

 sunshine in one second, or even less, requiring an exposure of 

 perhaps half-an-hour's duration in the interior of a church. 



Then there is the perspective. A photographer who would 

 represent nature naturally, should go out provided with a series 

 of lenses of varying foci. Por instance, a subject of narrow 

 ano-le. say, a deep ravine, with a mountain as distance, will 

 require a lens of long focus ; for if one of short focus were 

 employed, the foreground would be exaggerated, the distance 

 dwarfed. On the other hand, a wide subject, which must be 

 wholly included, will demand a wide-angle lens of short focus. 

 "When photographs are defective in perspective (or rather 

 appear so to be — for the perspective is optically correct), it is 

 through the use of an unsuitable lens ; and therefore since 

 landscape painters, in these days of light and portable apparatus, 

 and increased facilities, appear to employ photography more and 

 more, to get their drawing correct, it is ^desirable that they 

 should have some acquaintance with photographic optics. 



As to colour ; some colours, every one knows, such as the 

 reds, and pinks, and yellows, make but little impression on the 

 silver-plate; — a rhododendron bush covered with trusses of 

 scarlet blooms, or a meadow of buttercups, though bright enough 

 to the eye, being anything but bright in a photograph. 



And as to clouds ; to sympathy between sky and landscape ; 

 and to general atmospheric effect ; — these great adjuncts to 

 pictorial beauty are almost beyond the capacity of the best 

 photographers. Indeed, when good clouds do appear in a 

 photograph, it may be taken for granted, in nine cases out of 

 ten, that they were taken at a different time, at a different place, 

 and on a separate plate, and therefore have really no connexion 

 whatever with the landscape they adorn. Mist rising in a valley, 

 sun in one part, and shade in another, are not difficult to 

 portray; but a natural sky and good atmospheric effect are, and 

 perhaps always will be, as regards a photograph, conspicuous 

 by their absence. 



Taking these difficulties into consideration, and then turning 

 to the artistic side of landscape work, it is probably true that, in 

 spite of his camera and lens, which on the face of them would 

 seem to give him an immeasurable advantage, the photographer 



